Btw for all his limitations Gombrich -- Gombo, as my old Ren-Ref history teacher Tony Grafton used to call him -- was a very great historian, and the leader of a school of great art historians, the Warburg School.
Gombo himself is sort of the art-historical equivalent of the New Criticism in literature (Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks), which called for exacting attention to the text and its formal structure and to hell with any wider context.... AN
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Thanks to all for suggestion on Hayek.
I don't want to get far into Gombrich at the moment. But thanks also for this idea---the equivalent of New School.
It explains a lot of why I reacted to English department courses badly, in the same way that reacted to my required art history. The university system didn't like or respect I guess is a better word the practive of art, so they front loaded all their degrees with lots of art history requirements. I must have taken maybe four years of it over the eight and half it took to get a masters. Anyway I could never understand why I kept getting mediocre grades on papers. Now I know. They didn't like the way I looked at art, pure and simple. I was scratching arounnd trying to figure out what they wanted and never did figure it out. I just wasn't an academic writer.
The effect of teaching art history the way it was done back then completely isolated the arts from their social contexts, except to note who commissioned work, where it was orginially held or owned etc. It was almost an anti-historical view, that left a lot out of understanding the art.
One of consequence of this US academic style was that I turned to European literature and philosphy instead. Suddenly context, social meanings, historical background came into view in almost all of those courses. So I learned more about european history and social struggles, schools, etc, than those in the UK and US.
Every time I picked up something on the US or UK, I just loathed it, all its anal moralisms and vaguely punitive, stingey sort of mentality stood out. And of course its class laden snobism. I still don't like a lot of that stuff.
Oh, I forgot to mention Timothy Clark. His work on Manet is very good, and very Marxist in inspiration...
CG